Freesia McKee

During the Pandemic, I Lose My Spelling

The first word I tried
to spell and lost was Lisa.
When I needed it, I couldn’t
get the letters right for business,

incarnate, freely, or rough.
The year never quite filled up
with anything that stuck.

Each word fleeced an imprint
on my mind’s hot sand
where I’d buried telegenic, tortoise, oriole,
and leapt. I’d buried the lead

in a place I couldn’t stand, so hot
I wouldn’t go there. We lost
so much in a year, Mary, Lance:
we didn’t quite have funerals.

A queue of barefoot pallbearers
nursing burning toes
wasn’t a uniform, conventional
gathering. Each day

was just an echo of the conventions
we were too high ashore to remember,
missing letters from missing people,
every blank space a shoveling out.

Freesia McKee (she/her) writes about history, place, gender, genre, and empathy through poetry, creative prose, book reviews, and literary criticism. Recent work has appeared in Fugue, The Stained Anthology, About Place Journal, Porter House Review, Chalkbeat, The Slowdown, and on her local NPR affiliate. Headmistress Press published her poetry chapbook, How Distant the City. Freesia served as the Fall 2022 Poet in Residence at Ripon College, and she currently works as an Assistant Professor of English at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. She’s writing a collection of essays about Florida.